Tomorrow

     Adam Thompson’s eyes tore open in a sudden realization of pain. The harsh noise around him only adding to the pain that streaked through his whole body. For several minutes he sat there, waiting for something to happen. Suddenly the callous noise stopped, and Adam’s throat began to ache. As his eyes started to focus, he noticed that a large bubble of glass sat mere inches away from his face. Startled, he jerked to the left, little tugs on his right arm catching him. Lifting his hands up, he pressed against an almost rubber substance that coated the inside of his container. He was in a coffin, he knew it. They must have thought he was dead, they must have buried him. The sudden realization and shock brought him into a scream, but his throat simply warbled for a second then died in a hoarse crack. Adam lied still, trying to remain calm, trying to remember what had happened.

     “Hey buddy, you look a little pale.” Adam remembered Paul saying. It had been a week or so ago, on their way to work. Adam had shrugged it off, saying it was from a cold or something. When they’d gotten to the shop, Adam had hardly sat down before he began to feel faint. There was a blank spot in his memory, a white void that troubled Adam. What had happened...

     “Now, there's no reason to panic, the disease is fatal, but he has many more months to live, maybe even a year. All you can do to help him is to just be there for him in his time of need.” Adam remembered a man saying those words. A tall man in a white coat. A doctor. They were in a hospital. They were talking about him.

     “It’s a new process. Now, before the disease has a chance to spread, we halt the syndrome by cryostasis, then, probably only a few years from now, we,” he chuckled like it was a humorous event, being frozen alive, “we thaw you out. You see, when we find a treatment, we can save you. Your chances of living naturally until that time is slim, so we slow down time for you, until we can find a cure.” Another doctor, a short fat man. He looked rich, had to be rich to be running this bogus program. Adam doubted it completely, but Grandpa, he had faith in this new technology, dropped his entire life’s earnings on this one chance. False hope was all it was.

     “This chemical will prevent your cells and pathways from rupturing from the freezing process. Don’t worry, we’ve tested it, it works.” The assistant had said those sugar coated words with such certainty. Adam knew she’d never been frozen. Or, if she had, it had been a while ago, as she still had her hair. The manual had said that some things might happen. Almost everyone lost their hair, or their fingernails, or their teeth. Some people lost whole limbs, but that was rare. Least, that was what the manual said.

     “Looks like a coffin,” one of the other people had said. A short girl, blond hair, had Parkinson’s Disease. “Yeah, but coffins don’t have windows.” Another guy, big, strong, but had gotten aids while in Africa on safari. They’d all traded stories in the waiting room. Now, in little more then their undies, they were going to be turned into a human ice cube.

     Laying in the pod, Adam listened to the speaker, “Breath slowly, and count backwards from twenty. Remain calm, the liquid is only part of the process. You will not drown.” Adam thought those were not the most calming words as a lid shut over him. He could see out the small skylight, a little bubble, while the faint glowing blue liquid flowed in at his feet . The entire container shifted so that he would have normally been standing. The fluid slowly worked up to his neck, and over his face. At first panic set in, but rather than drowning, Adam found he was able to breath. Like thick air it flooded into his lungs. He burbled a faint eight and then the world grew dark.

     Not a coffin, he told himself, pressing harder on the lid. There was a faint pop, a slight hiss, and a slow seep of old stale air. The lid slid sideways, as if on hinges, before coming to a stop, then it slowly upended itself, letting in the faint flickering light from the outside. As Adam sat upright he noticed that the casket was at an odd angle, the bottom of the pod resting on the floor, while the other end sat against the wall. As he sat up, several jerks on his arms and back caught his attention. Adam finally looked down at himself.

     His fingernails were still there, and so were all his phalanges. Looking up his arms, he noticed several intravenous tubes plugged into his flesh. Adam plucked them loose in slow motion, hoping for only small pinpricks of pain rather then surges. Feeling his back, he found a few more tubes, each one he removed with painstaking slowness. He noticed that, while his long brown hair had fallen out, new stubble was growing in its place. A five o’clock’s shadow was thick on his face, and from the feel of it, he had been laying there for a week or so.

     Rising from the sarcophagus and standing on the cold floor, Adam found that there was an inch or so of water pooled in the small room. Scooping up a hand full and holding it in the faint light, Adam noticed a very weak blue glow. The liquid smelt old and rancid and glancing back at his own pod, Adam noticed a small crack in the base, where even now more of the fluid dripped out. Turning around several times, hoping to see a glowing red exit sign, Adam yelled out hoarsely. “Hello? Is anyone here? Hello!?” But only the immediate echo of his voice and the occasional dripping sound returned to his ears.

     Stumbling through the room, Adam noticed that there seemed to be many more pods on the floor. Smacking his shin on cold metal containers, and sliding around on loose wires and tubes in the mess, Adam came to the other side of the room. He splayed his fingers and ran them up and down the walls. Finding a smooth patch where none of the pods hung from the side, Adam frantically searched until he found what he was looking for. He flipped the switch, and with the flood of illumination came a stark sight.

     Adam didn’t want to breath once the lights were on. Several pods, maybe fifteen of them, were sprawled across the floor. Looking over the conglomeration, he noticed that only a few of the pods were open, and the only open one without a body in it was his. Those that were open were the ones that scared Adam the most. Long deceased corpses, dehydrated and stringy, they sat in their caskets like sleeping bodies. But they weren’t sleeping, they were dead. Like the mummies of Egypt they laid in their sarcophaguses. Most of the pods were cracked, but to a much greater degree than his own. Some still hung from the sides, long umbilical cables running from the back of the case to square openings in the walls. Adam traced his own pods’ cable up seven rows, the opening baring marks of long grinding and wear.

     Searching those pods on the floor or those hanging from the walls, those that he could reach, he found no one alive. Only ropey bodies long lost to the passage of time. Suddenly realizing he was standing in a morgue, Adam rushed to the only door in the room. Fear grasped his senses. He pushed on it, but it proved too resilient. Backing up and getting a run at it, Adam jumped through the air, his shoulder slamming into the door and bouncing off like a rag doll thrown against a brick wall. He heard a faint thud on impact, but when he checked the door it still refused to move. Frantically he pounded on the door, yelling as he beat his fists bloody against the cold hard steel. Adam sank to the floor, his knees giving out as he began to sob. What had happened, why wasn’t there anyone here? He buried his face in his hands and poured out all his tears of frustration.

     A faint dink sound, like someone dropping a pen, sounded from the room. Adam looked up, his eyes searching the area like a cornered animal. A wheeze and a faint cracking sound came from the distance. An old lifeless arm, hanging limply over the edge of its coffin, drooped lower as if reaching for the ground. More wheezing and crackling followed from many of the other opened pods. Adam stood up, the short hair on the back of his neck standing on end. A steady stench of death filled the room, clogging his nostrils and filling his lungs. A chill ran down Adam’s spine and his blood ran cold as his eyes passed over one of the dead bodies. Laying in a casket which was perched against the wall at a vertical angle, the nearly perfectly preserved body seemed to bend over. The cadaver, leaning forward and sliding out of its container, fell to the ground. The heads’ empty sockets stared across the room, matching Adam’s gaze.

     Jumping to his feet and throwing his weight against the door one last time, Adam landed flat on his face as it pitched open, spilling him out on the dusty floor of the next room. Adam picked himself back up and started running down the hall blindly, the faint light that flooded from emergency lighting stations barely assisting him. He tripped with every other step, garbage cans, medical beds, fallen overhead lamps, and even the occasional dead body all caught his feet. Unlike those in the crypt, many of these bodies were little more then dust and bones, a few were a bit more human like, but nowhere near as well preserved as those in the room.

     Scampering down the hall like a mad creature in a cage, Adam rounded a corner and saw two large sliding doors, the kind one finds at a super market or a hospital. As Adam quickly approached the doors he remembered that the “lab” had originally been so small that it had only normal entrance doors. It must have gotten good business in the time since his deep sleep. Sliding to a stop at the doors, Adam waited for them to open. He stood there catching his breath for a few minutes before he realized that the doors didn’t open. Grabbing an old umbrella from a pile of bones in the corner, Adam slammed it in-between the two doors, levering them open a few inches before the umbrella bent in half. Fitting his fingers through the crack and pulling with all his strength, Adam managed to open them a mere foot. Cautiously sticking his head through, he scanned the space outside. Rather then the view of long city streets buzzing with people he was greeted with another set of doors. Forcing the first set of doors open farther, then wedging them open with a chair, Adam walked through to the anteroom, to probe further.

     Crouching down before the cracked and dusty glass, Adam stood in a small pile of sand and debris. Poking through the shattered section of the left door was an upside down automobile, the paint long gone, the lights and plastic bumper little more then shreds. Even the rubber on the front tires was worn away. The only identifiable mark on the vehicle was an elongated and squat lowercase “t”, set dead center in the hood of the upturned car. While much of the compound had remained like a time capsule, this entrance seemed more like it had been left out to weather the elements. Mounds of rock and metal wreckage pressed against the doors, Adam dared not breath to hard, least the feeble glass mosaic shatter and let the outside world spill in.

     Slowly edging back into the compound, Adam removed the chair and slowly pushed the doors shut, leaving but a small crack for his fingers to get a grip through. Stumbling over to a counter, he sat down with his back against it. He had to make a plan, had to gather materials to survive. Something majorly bad had to have happened to drive everyone from this place, to burry a whole building. Maybe the proverbial Armageddon had happened, maybe there had just been a landslide. Old tales and stories of the end of the world flooded through Adam’s head.

     Adam quickly realized that he had no concept of time or space. He remembered the facility had been in a suburb of Seattle, though he couldn’t remember which. Since the compound was so different than he remembered, maybe they had moved him while he was in cold storage. Scanning the walls and floor around him, he saw no evidence of where he might be, no region specific material or designs. The clocks on the walls and the watches in the piles of bones were either unreadable or spoke the time of 7:15, AM or PM was unknown, as those clocks that told the time were all the old dial kinds.

     Searching through the waiting room in the compound, Adam gathered what supplies he could find. A Swiss Army knife found in a pile of bones, a lighter, and a leatherman discovered in one of the drawers were set in a separate pile of, “life saving supplies”. A full flask of whisky scavenged from a locker in the adjacent room and a ball of string also went into that same pile. Finding a few scraps of usable clothing from piles of dead bones, Adam slipped on the cloths with some remorse, but one thing kept him from shuddering too much, “They aren’t going to need these cloths anymore.”

     Finding a pair of blue jeans, now seriously faded, and a pair of sneakers that barely fit, Adam relinquished a skeleton of its lab coat which had changed into a light brown rather then the classic white. Discovering a working sharpie marker in one of the drawers, Adam proceeded to search the compound for more supplies and information. At every turn, he would clear the floor of debris and mark a half circle, connecting the hallway he had just come from to the intended hall. While walking through a particularly bleak hallway, debris piles that once were people and equipment blanketing the floor, Adam remembered playing war games with his older brother when they were just little kids, watching action movies, and every book he had ever read on the topic of survival or espionage. Since he was a small child, Adam recalled his constant hatred of those people who would irrefutably get lost and murdered in the thriller movies, or the person who unsuspectingly fell into a trap. Little scraps of these memories coursed through his head, reminding him of nearly every trick him and his brother would come up with while they watched the hapless people in the movie.

     Walking around a corner into what appeared to be an alcove relegated to rest and relaxation for any off duty personnel, Adam spotted a calendar hanging from the wall. Approaching it slowly as if it was a wild animal, he crept up to it. Breathing very gradually, Adam quickly read the calendar. “December 2059” was the date, skimming the table of days, he noticed that the last marked off date was the 24th. Adam sank back on his heels, “2059,” he thought, “that’s nearly 50 years! And who knows how long ago this was!”

     Tears welled up in his eyes, “Their all gone...everyone...everyone I've ever known... If age didn’t get them, then surely this cataclysm did!” suddenly Adam stopped, a glimmer of hatred flaring within him. Standing up and reaching for the calendar, he sought to turn the page, to the new year. As his hands touched the paper, it crumbled away like ash. Shock took Adam this time. It took a very long time for paper to get that fragile, this much he knew.

     Adam stepped back, letting out a sigh of accepting his fate. It was time to start anew. For all he knew, the rest of the world could be just fine. Priority one was to get out of the building. “Scratch that”, Adam thought, “Priority one was to find some water.” Walking off down the hall, marking this turns as he went, Adam came upon a set of double doors. Pushing them open he discovered a large room filled with tables and chairs. A smile ran across Adam's face for a brief second, the first lucky brake. Walking into the back room, where the food for the cafeteria would have no doubt been assembled, he glanced around. Unlike most of the building, the emergency lights here didn’t seem to work. Adam paced up to a fridge, held his breath just for luck, and opened it.

     A small deluge of water flooded out of the fridge as the door was opened, running over Adam's shoes and soaking his pants. Then the smell hit him, for decades the food had rotted in the peace and quite of the closed fridge, with the power long gone everything from milk to eggs had gone rotten, gases produced by decaying food stuffs exploding their containers and splattering them in the closed space. Simmering in a conglomeration of their own juices for who knows how long, the entire fridge had melted down into a mixture of both Yellow Stone and the primordial pit from which life had first spawned. It wasn’t a smell of rotten eggs, rancid milk, or even putrid fish- all of which Adam thought were likely items found in a fridge of this size. Rather, those few bacterium who had survived their short stint in cold storage had awoken to a smorgasbord of food. So long ago had the fridge been abandoned by man, that even the bacteria had eventually died off from the ensuing starvation brought on by a habitat ideal for breading aside from the limiting factors of space and food supply.

     As Adam looked at the putrid yellow water which ran across the floor, hiding in nooks and crannies, seeping into old flooring and cupboards, he couldn’t help but think that right then he had lost his chance for both food and water. Then it dawned on him, the freezer. Guaranteed to have some ice in it, and thus a greater quantity of water, Adam searched the kitchen for what he guessed was a freezer. Finding a chest freezer in the corner, Adam slowly opened the lid on the treasure chest of hope and expectation.

     The smell that escaped was the same one of death and long stagnation that had escaped from the fridge, but unlike the previous case, no deluge of water could occur, as the door opened up. Looking into the box that once held pounds of frozen meats and vegetables, Adam saw atleast a foot of yellow liquid sitting in the bottom of the container. Odds and ends of plastic floated in the murky fluid. Realizing he could not drink such fowl water, he sat down on an island that was situated in the middle of the kitchen.

     If only he could purify it, like he and his father had done on the camping trip when he was eight. Fiddling through his pockets, Adam fumbled with the lighter, before taking it out. It still had some fluid in it, and the ignition wheel still seemed to work. He flicked the striker, and a small flame erupted from the plastic container. “Purify,” he thought. He glanced round the room, using the faint light from the flame like a candle. A stove sat across from the fridge, a large pot still sitting on its top. Adam blinked a few times, as the thought worked its way through his mind. “Boil that water,” the thought said, “and remove all impurities.”

     But Adam knew he needed some way to catch the steam, then cool it back into water. The steam would escape out of the pot, while any chemicals or such would remain in the container, he hoped. First he inspected the stove, its cold metal long since forgotten by the ages. On a closer look, he noticed that it was infact a gas stove, and with a short check, it became evident that there still remained some propane to power the cooker. Locating an extremely large funnel in one of the kitchens many drawers and cupboards, Adam began his search for a pot of roughly the same size. Within several minutes he found what he was looking for. Realizing that to much of the steam would escape from the seem, Adam set down his accumulated pots and funnels, then retraced his rout back to the main entrance. On one of the offshoot rooms was a sign that said “custodian’s storage.” The door was locked, but taking a waiting room chair and walking up to the door, Adam had it set in his mind to bash the door down.

     Picking the chair up in both hands, Adam braced himself for the impulse of kinetic energy that would reflect off the door. Gritting his teeth in preparation for the swing, Adam paused. A horrible feeling welled up in his stomach. All around him laid dead bodies, long since rendered unidentifiable as little more then bones and dust, with bits of clothing. Smashing the door down would cause a great loud noise, he knew, and that made him feeling like he was about to take a piss on some ones grave. He set the chair down, wondering what he could do that might be a bit quieter, besides the chances of beating the door down with a chair were slim even in an optimists world. “I could pick the lock,” he thought, but quickly realized he didn’t know anything about picking locks and had no tools to do it with anyways. “To bad its locked. Why’d that damn janitor have to lock the door?” Then it struck him. “The janitor’s bones have to be somewhere in the building, he would have to be here, somewhere on the floor around me. And where he is, so would be his keys.”

     And so Adam began a new search, checking for big rings of keys, generally for keys that looked like house keys or the keys his brother had for the back room at the repair station. Several times he would rummage through a pile of bones, only to find car keys or when he found keys that matched his search parameters and he rushed back to the door, they would not fit or wouldn’t work. Having combed more than half the building, repeatedly avoiding the room from whence he came- he knew that it had to have been just rapid decay with him having disturbed the bodies, but he wasn’t going to take the chance- and any rooms where windows looked feeble and likely to spill in the outside world, he found no keys that fit his needs. “Maybe the janitor had been outside, or off duty when the disaster struck.” Finally, he gave up. Turning back the way he had come, Adam noticed that a small door in the wall, about half way up, was open. An axe, a large fire axe, hung in a wall facet. Pulling the old tool free, Adam shunned himself for being so inobservant. While he had been running around, getting hungry and thirsty, he had missed many opportunities to get the door open.

     Walking back to the door, Adam swung the axe with a passion. The finely honed blade splintered the wooden door like fire kindling, the old gate falling apart like a building before a wrecking ball. Adam set the axe down and looked around in the dark room. No emergency lights showed the way, so removing the lighter from his pocket, he flicked the wheel.

     “Let there be light.” Adam said aloud, as the small candle like flame shown weakly in the room. There, now covered in the shards that had been the door, laid a pile of bones. Searching the mound, he found the very rack of keys he had been looking for. Tucking them away into a pocket, Adam began to search the room for supplies. Duck-tape was his main concern...

     An hour and a half later, with a few cuts and a new found honor for the early inventors of mans past, Adam had his working purifying system. The tainted water boiled away in large pots while the steam was collected by scavenged tin ventilation tubing where it would cool down and puddle up in another basin. While the water bubbled away, Adam deemed this occasion worthy of a feast.

     Canned pork ‘n beans was accompanied by a serving of chili marked the first meal Adam's stomach had consumed in what was likely more then 50 years. It sat surprisingly well when quickly fallowed by a canister of peaches and a smooth whine -dated 2049- mixed with the syrup from the can. Adam shut down the boiler, laid down on a table closest to the kitchen, and slipped off to sleep.

     Dreams. Dreams like none he had had before. A field of grass, stretching up a mountain to its snow capped peaks. Hills covered in trees of varying shapes and sizes. A blue sky with fuzzy cotton clouds accenting its virtuous purity. A small river courses through this paradise -that while not viewed, is known to be surrounded by snow and ice and death in all directions- a paradise set on the top of the world. A nice warm breeze combs the grass around him, and Adam turns to see a stark beauty. A maiden with golden locks, and a smile that could calm the sea. Eyes so blue they chilled the soul, and a presence like an angel...

     Adam rolled over and fell off the table, smacking his face on the cold hard floor. Like a rock thrown into a mirror, the dream was shattered. “Shattered...” he thought. While pulling himself upright and glancing around, Adam momentarily suspended his disbelief of this new reality to take a look at things from a different angle. He walked up to the large back wall of the mess-hall and put his nose right up to it. Then, like some primitive scanner, he worked his way back and forth, lower and lower with each pass. A crack here, a large splinter here, it all told a tale. Who knew how long this building would last.

     Finding another lab-coat of fairly good condition in the relaxation alcove, Adam bundled up twelve cans of various foods (canned fruits and other camping favorites were not over looked; Adam recalled his neighbor living in the woods for a full month off of a dozen cans of food, some water, and a lota luck when his truck slipped off the road on a camping trip). He then proceeded to empty five large cork-top wine bottles, there contents flowing down the ancient sink like the blood of so many men, and refilled them with his newly distilled water. Discovering a box of matches and a small package of birthday candles in a drawer, Adam proceeded to melt the wax and seal the wine bottles. With his goods packed, Adam fetched his recently attained fire axe and walked to the twin doors that separated him from the outside world.

     Wedging the door back open with the chair he had used before, Adam crouched down by the upturned car. The side window was all but gone, and Adam used the end of the fire axe to clear away any remaining shards. He set down his supplies and hastily stuck his head through the window. The inside of the car was little more then bare steal, even the chairs had mostly rotted away. The small two-door vehicle appeared to have, at one point in time, a large bench like seat in the back. Adam crawled into the upturned vehicle, cautiously peering at what remained of the bench. Right behind the damaged upholstery frame was another empty space. At first Adam thought it was an optical illusion, but careful prodding with the axe revealed that it was infact the trunk of the car on the other side of the seat.

     A bit of levering and the ancient bolts sheared, the metal shattering into rusty dust shards and the seat came free. Adam poked his head into the trunk. With a feeling of claustrophobia, Adam realized he was head and shoulders deeper then the mound of dirt around the car. But this looked to be a dead end. Even in its decrepit state, the metal of the trunk on the car would easily repel any of his efforts to tear through it. Adam stopped that line of thought just as soon as it began. Dave, his father, had always said, “Look for the easiest solution first.” And he was usually right. Adam wondered if cars made fifty years after science turned off his lights would still have the safety release that was mandatory in his day. Blindly fumbling in the dark, Adam finally found the cable. He pulled it and a slight “cuh-chunk” sound echoed in the close quarters. The trunk slid open an inch, hardly enough space for a mouse to crawl through, let alone a man. Adam put his eye to the crack and peered through into the murky gloom.

     The phrase “Darker then the inside of a cow,” came to mind. But it wasn’t the pure darkness one found in a photolab, Adam could make out faint shapes on the other side. Rectangular protrusions here, a squat cube there, nothing definite but for the feeling of space. And space was exactly what Adam was looking for. Placing the handle of the axe in the crack separating the trunk from the rest of the car, he levered and pushed until the grating sound of the lid scraping against stone disappeared as the trunk slipped open. Adam, now levering against open air, slammed his head into the floor of the trunk.

     As the stars and fireworks cleared from his vision, Adam glanced into the newly opened space. It was still dark, but now he could get a bigger picture. Even better, he could crawl through. But first, a light source. Immediate images of Indian Jones walking through ancient ruins with a torch were dashed to bits when one considered how much oxygen fire burned, and with no way of telling how much there was, you didn’t want to waste any of the precious commodity of life. Adam crawled back out of the car, making sure that nothing could collapse and cut off his newly discovered path. He grabbed his supplies and started down the hall for the custodians closet.

     Feeling his head, Adam knew he was destined to get a goose egg. The beating of his heart made the bruise pulse and before long Adam was half heartedly looking for a helmet before he did anymore work. Arriving at the closet, Adam stepped over the shattered door and scanned the shelves, this time looking for items not related to the purifying of water. Laying on the highest shelf, nearly out of site, was a flash light. A big heavy duty Mag-Light, it felt like a club in Adam's hands. Pressing the button, he sighed. No light came from the poor dead stick. Unscrewing the cap and dumping the batteries on the floor, he noticed that the dead power cells looked to be burned, almost like they’d discharged all of their power at once. Searching through the shelves again, Adam found a box of D batteries, all of which still looked in working condition. He took out two, then put the rest into his pack of supplies. Popping the two cells into the flash light and screwing on the top, Adam pushed the button bringing on a fountain of light. He quickly turned it back off and started back towards the car.

     Half way there, he had this odd feeling. It took him a while to recall what it was, that was how vague the feeling was, a tingling in his lower guts. With a shocking realization he remember that he hadn’t gone pee in what amounted to most peoples life span. Not wanting to defile what could end up being his new home, Adam looked for a room off the beaten path. A fairly good sized room not far from the mess-hall had signs of having once been a bathroom. Adam unzipped his stolen pants and proceeded to relieve himself in the discolored porcelain bowl. At first he was shocked, and slightly worried, to discover his urine was a light blue colored. It even glowed! But after a couple seconds it turned into a green, then finally shifted to the standard light yellow. The blue glow reminded him of the pool of liquid in the “awakening room”. Now that he thought about it, it was probably the cell stabilizer that had allowed him to be frozen to begin with. No surprise that some of it had passed through his kidneys.      “Just can’t wait till I take a shit, it’ll probably look like a glow stick...” Adam said under his breath. He quickly finished his business and left the restroom, not bothering to wash his hands. A few feet outside of the lavatory, he found a backpack in a pile of bones next to a chair. While the volumes inside crumbled to dust the moment Adam picked up the book bag, the bag itself was in good condition. A little work re-adjusting the straps to fit some one of a smaller build and Adam had a working pack sack. Emptying the contents of the bag, and refilling it with his own supplies, Adam was off again. Stopping at the kitchen, Adam put a few more cans into the pack before going back to work.

     Turning on the flashlight and peering back into the gloom, Adam found the view both humorous and disturbing. A medium sized kitchen, of the late 90’s variety, was dashed and smashed and tilted upwards at what looked to be a forty five degree angle. The odd rectangle and squares seen before turned out to be a fridge, a stove, and a microwave. Pushing his pack through the narrow crawl space, Adam glanced back into the hospital. His unknown home for decades, who knew if he’d ever see it again.

     Crawling through into the dilapidate kitchen, Adam slipped on his pack and glanced around. Arduously climbing up the floor of the room, he got a good glance into the adjacent living room. Pulling himself up onto a dividing wall edge, he perched there like some cat sitting on a cricked fence. Questions raced through his mind, was he in a house? Was this an apartment complex? Who had lived here? What had smashed these two buildings together like so much empty weight thrown around by a child?

     As Adam searched around the room, he noticed much of the floor and walls had buckled as if the room had survived an earthquake. For all Adam knew, it probably had.



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